pink screens : archives

For its 13th edition, running from 6-15 November 2014, Pink Screens will be taking a look at the reality of life in today’s Italy - hardly “la dolce vita”. We follow the tortured path of a marginalised androgynous youth in the very dark Piu buio di mezzanote by Sebastiano Riso and that of feisty Beatrice, a trans mechanic in Fuoristrada. This year’s guests include Vincent Dieutre who will be presenting his Pasolini-influenced film Orlando Ferito and Fabio Mollo, who will present Il sud è Niente, a beautiful portrait of Grazia, on the search for her brother and her own identity.

Alongside these depictions of contemporary Italy, the festival’s opening will give you the chance to discover Alfred Molina and John Lithgow as a “young” married couple full of humour and tenacity in Ira Sachs’ (“Keep the Lights on”, Pink Screens 2012) Love is Strange and the magnificent 52 Tuesdays, which has won acclaim at the biggest international festivals, showing how the life of adolescent Billie is turned upside down by the transition her mother decides to begin.

This year we have some 80 short and full-length films in our programme from all four corners of the globe (experimental films, documentaries and surprising works of fiction) but there are also debates, meetings, exhibitions and performances.

In closing we will be celebrating these ten days of cinema, of exploration of genders and sexuality with the unmissable Pink Night, preceded by Madeleine Olnek’s hilarious comedy The Foxy Merkins as well as the moving story of a young blind boy who falls in love with his classmate in Daniel Ribeiro’s Hoje eu quero voltar sozinho.

Focus - New Italian Cinéma

At last! Italian cinema is finally waking up from the long Berlusconi-inspired crisis it had plunged into. This renaissance brings us a series of films which push the boundaries of gender and sexuality with feistiness and determination. Whether political, taking on the ills of Italian society like the Mafia in Il Sud è Niente and the racist atmosphere of certain northern regions in Piccola Patria; or more intimate in nature, like the two superb tales of adolescents having to look after themselves: Asia Argento’s Incompresa and Piu Buio di Mezzanote; the films shown at Pink Screens paint a portrait of an Italy searching to reinvent itself and escape from the usual clichés of the sacred family unit. As Vincent Dieutre reminds us in Orlando Ferito , his superb cinematic homage to the legacy of Pier Paolo Pasolini: “I know that something of the fate of Europe is played out in Italy. But what?”

On the occasion of this theme, Pink Screens is collaborating with the Sicilia Queer Filmfest in this 5th edition. The latter keeps striving to deal with issues related to gender and different sexualities through films that combine intelligence, intimism and aesthetics. Director Tatiana Lo Locono reveals: “I find the same programming concerns in both festivals with films such as Orlando Ferito by Vincent Dieutre (France, 2013) or Piu Buio di Mezzanote by Sebastiano Riso (Italy, 2014). These two films bring forward all that Sicily achieves in inspiring directors, islanders or not, who depict it such as it is: hard hit by the economic, social and moral crisis without losing its ’rabbia’, in the words of Pasolini, its rage to succeed.”